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@RCAgator @Satire_Maybe @financedystop I've got test scores for me. I talk to enough folks, in enough life stages/careers/etc that surely some of them are going to be below average.

@jeffreyb @Satire_Maybe @financedystop Either you're underestimating the IQ of the people you talk to, or you're overestimating yours.

Having an IQ over 130 is a curse and a blessing

@RCAgator @Satire_Maybe @financedystop Not going to talk existentialism with the lady giving me a haircut, necessarily, but she can tell me about the way to go about training a new apprentice, that joke her grandkid made, the economics of the business, what makes a pair of scissors worth paying extra money for, etc.

@RCAgator @Satire_Maybe @financedystop Reasonably often? I talk to everyone. You can find relatively dumb people with narrow, yet compatible interests. And in any case, just about everybody I meet knows more than me about something.

@Satire_Maybe @Devon_Eriksen_ @financedystop "people are lucky to be hyperconnected these days with places like Reddit and X to find likeminded people" I think unlucky, because it is very easy to become trapped in a façade of socialization. Or worse.

True. Insofar as the OP goes, people are lucky to be hyperconnected these days with places like Reddit and X to find likeminded people. Back in the day intelligent people would turn themselves into hermits just out of despair. So i think it is less of a curse and more of an inconvenience. If you dont expose yourself to people across the IQ range you cannot ground yourself in the realities of having to live with them. A big problem i see is the inability of smart people to empathise with everyone else. They fall into blank slate thinking and other foundational errors. Balance in all things etc...

@viewfromthezoo @OVTweetmarck Learning how to talk to Deez Nutz people is a useful and enjoyable intellectual exercise. It's a vibrant culture, full of rich traditions, fascinating folkways, and E10. E10? E10 deez nutz.

@OVTweetmarck As a fellow “smart” person, has he considered just trying to make deez nutz jokes in a group chat with some guys he works with? It is very fulfilling.

Step 1: get over yourself

@Alsadius @JoshEakle I spend a relatively large amount of time reading material written by and about the Amish. Growth rate is incredibly fast & after having branched off of mainstream culture, they preserved some things and developed others in new ways.

@Alsadius @JoshEakle I think conflict may happen eventually, though. It's a very isolated group.

Setting aside half the misinformation in this post, the Amish are also clearly a community that refuses to assimilate to American society. And yet no one on the right seems to care. Curious.

@UpdatingOnRome "Just do something" is an underused therapy modality.

Chronologically.

@JohnyNoProblems @cremieuxrecueil The older cadaver-derived HGH used to give people prion disorders. Tall people do generally die younger than short people (more cells to get cancer, cardiovascular strain).

@cremieuxrecueil There is data that shows consistent use of HGH reduces life expectancy by quite a bit. I'm not an expert on this by any means but it's definitely worth looking into if your gonna do it.

Everyone should wake up to this trend. In the West, rich people are making their kids taller. In the East, this is catching on as a general trend for status-maxxing parents.

@OneFineJay Tree of Heaven is quite repulsive, as well. Not invasive, but quite horrifying, is Florida's own manchineel tree, so poisonous that standing under it during rainfall will give you blisters.

Bradford Pear. The correct answer at all types is the demonic tree from the ninth circle of hell, the Bradford Pear

@politicalmath The problem is, from what I've heard, Wright's houses really are not very liveable. Roofs leak, not enough storage, structural problems. He wasn't interested in anything but the aesthetic side.

1) I need this house. Please someone give me $1.2 million dollars so I can have it 2) What happened that we don't have any modern frank lloyd wrights? Why did his system for building beautiful, livable houses not become a norm for American builders? x.com/zoeloveshouses…

@lymanstoneky I tried to find a source for this without success. For all that nicotine is an insecticide, the inhalation of one cigarette's worth, spread out over an entire human body, does not seem like very much.

Wait, is this a lowkey explanation for the rise in tick borne illnesses?!?!?!?!?

@AntigoneJournal Emperor Claudius's works on Etruscan history & language. Manetho's Aegyptica. Anything non-Homer from the Epic Cycle The missing volumes of Livy's Ab Urbe Condita

If any Greek or Latin text could be found in the unread Herculaneum scrolls, what would make you happiest for the world to rediscover?

@dmdebruijn The fundamental problem with this framing is that the most attractive way to do #3 is with lazy rivers, daily housekeeping, plush sports stadiums, gourmet meals, and an absolute minimum of work, while using someone else's money to make it happen.

The US university needs to accomplish three things all at once 1) produce excellence that shapes a career; 2) allow students to stand on their own intellectual feet; and just as importantly, 3) provide young people with a time of life that’ll be memorable, formative, significant. It very often is a life time memory, a thing that shapes a person’s identity, sometimes entire communities through sports etc, builds social links, and is quite often something people think of as *the* best choice they’ll have made. That’s not a bit of accounting to the quickest “skill set acquisition”.

This stuff always ignores that Americans like to go to college. Being at college is a phase of life. They’re not trying to rush in and out. That doesn’t mean there cannot be quick programs. But US colleges do not primarily “allocate students to employer needs”, or whatever.

@joeybeastmarket What's the source for this?

The average tick would die of nicotine poisoning if you smoked one cigarette before it bit you. Make sure to take a drag every few minutes on a hike. It’s for your health. You likely only have 6 months of this being effective before nicotine resistant ticks are accidentally released from the national laboratory for preventing ticks from developing nicotine resistance

Legalized sports betting has been a catastrophe. Recognizing this is kind of the price of entry for me to take your sense of how society works at all seriously.

@winexviv Nigeria last participated in 2021, not 2019, but the result was poor. Best result was in 2012, with a 67/100, easily beating all the African nations besides South Africa.

The last time Nigeria participated in the International Maths Olympiad (IMO) was in 2019. The government's reason then was that it was not important enough. The actual funding required is less than the cost of a brand new Hilux. This is the most prestigious academic competition in the world, and our children have been deprived of participation for years. Education has been pushed to the back seat for a long time, while illiteracy has been elevated. This needs to stop now!

@QiaochuYuan @mndl_nyc @ryanstvnsn It's making something of a comeback now, in part because switching to offline work is a way to make cheating via AI more difficult.

@mndl_nyc @ryanstvnsn woof. the idea that cursive is or might already be, like, only something historians study is certainly something

more scattered thoughts from 5 hours at the met - i think i didn't have some kind of maturity prerequisite for caring about museums before a few years ago or so. based on some stuff @ryanstvnsn said i tried thinking about the material history of each object, the way a person or people in a specific historical period had to make do with the materials and tools they had to put huge amounts of effort into creating these beautiful lasting things that people cared enough about to preserve until they ended up at the museum. trying to treat each object as a portal into the past. which i guess is the point of museums? but i don't think anyone had explained this to me before. like there was a sort of skill here i was missing - plus something that wasn't exactly a missing skill but some sort of missing sense of history as being all one thing that is connected, and connected to the present, and to things in my direct experience. one of the earliest versions of this that i tweeted about way back when it was kind of blowing my mind was seeing the trend of apocalyptic weapons in miyazaki movies as downstream of his experience being bombed as a kid in WWII. it's kind of obvious now but growing up i operated under this incredibly firm separation between reality and fiction that left me kind of confused about where ideas in fiction even came from - the met having areas themed after specific kinds of objects like "weapons" and "musical instruments" was extremely cool and made me curious whether there are museums that have themed sections like "sex toys" or "pornography" - the overhead lighting meant there was a lot of glare on a lot of the paintings (which were beautiful and frequently surprised me) in a way that felt like they slightly messed up the intended effect and i'm very curious what lighting conditions 17th-century dutch paintings or whatever were intended to be viewed under. i wanted to see them by the light of a fireplace or candle. @kendrictonn what's the deal with this - seeing gorgeous arabic calligraphy made me feel robbed by using boring fonts to write english. what a joy it would be to be able to write in a way that was visually beautiful in addition to the beauty of the meaning of the words. and in praise of god no less! getting to get really up close to the brushstrokes and seeing how beautiful and confident they were, the level of skill and dedication and time and effort it must've taken to get there; very very cool - anyway art is cool and based i might try to find a museum or something back home now

@lymanstoneky Moldova is much poorer and even more corrupt than Romania and has ongoing border disputes. I can see why they want to merge, but I'm dubious about the benefit to Romania, itself.

Honestly, yes, this is a good idea.